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09 January, 2012

In a TV show
called Supernanny, Jo Frost visits troubled parents and teaches them how to get
their kids back in order. Usually, as you would expect of reality TV drama, the
situations look hopeless at first, but the Supernanny intervention gives the
parents the tools they need to gain control of the situation at home. And then
they lived happily ever after.

The would-be
reality of the show aside, most of the episodes focus on pretty much the same
issues: the mother or father is unable to discipline the kids, resulting in
total chaos and mayhem at home. The kids punch the parents, beat each other up,
throw stuff etc. The parents look like an ambushed pack of new recruits – they have
no idea what they’re doing and what they should do. The remedy is always the
same: teaching the parents to say NO to their child. No, you can’t do that. No,
that’s wrong. No, you can’t have that.

What are
the parallels for our society? It seems to me that capitalism is one of the few
truly global phenomena in our world. Capitalism is the system of distributing
resources so that we can survive. Sounds like a mother to me. Our world, too,
seems not too unlike a Supernanny visit to Crawley: the peace and quiet is continuously
pierced by screams of “But I WANT that!” The demands never end.

In
Supernanny the solution is to teach the parents to discipline the kids. In our
system that would be to teach the “mother” – capitalism – to tell us no at some
point. The problem here lies at the heart of capitalism. It is a philosophy of
saying yes always, when there’s enough wanting. If enough people in the world
want purple apples, we’re soon enough going to have purple apples.

The
solution in this case could be analogous to the Supernanny show: teach the
parent to say no. In our case, that would be teaching capitalism to say no. To
say no, when we want too much or wrong things.

Now, I don’t
know how to do that. A start could be including actual environmental costs in
the cost of products. But to take such schemes further would be very complicated.
As an example, think of a burger. To an overweight person that burger is less
of a good choice than to a balanced-weight person. But to reflect this in the
pricing seems impossible. There are infinite variables to take into account.

Unfortunately,
we have no Supernanny to call on. There’s nobody to help us from the outside.
There’s only us, and we have to take care of this mess ourselves.

Therefore,
another alternative solution would be that we, the child in this situation,
develop and learn to have more sensible wants. We could try do develop out of
the phase in which we feel jealous of everything somebody else has and we don’t.
We could try to learn to want “the right
things”. That means wanting to want, or meta-wanting. But then again, I don’t
know how to do that either. Dammit.